Water boarding terrorists is exactly like killing a bunch of little kids, some being infants. Wow. As far as Garage goes, I am guessing that you are, in the true Clinton spirit, speaking of the literal text of the one editorial he wrote and ignoring everything else.

I'm happy to get that reminder that getting another Clinton in office would have been deadly, for some of us Americans. Maybe next time they would be seeking out another group they didn't like, perhaps crazed doctors that don't want to take medicare.

B. Hussein hasn't started killing people yet, he's content merely to weaken us sufficiently so that our enemies will.

Yet you still defend torture by the Bush administration. I guess if the victims are Muslims, everything is okay.

Um Freder, you wrote the above as a defense to the Clinton administration knowingly gassing innocent women and children. Are you arguing that if the victims are innocent Americans everything is ok with you? Or is your argument, as long as it is done be a Democrat administration it is ok with you?

Bill Clinton approved the use of tear gas on American citizens, specifically children in hopes of forcing their parents to surrender. And Garage and Federson think it is A OK. Don't ever foget that inside every leftist lurkes a killer. Federson and Garage just proved that.

Clinton made so many mistakes. He's lucky that the 9/11 Commission made a tacit(?) deal not to blame Bush or Clinton.

Freder--how many Americans died at Waco.

The bitter irony is that dastardly and evil Tim McVeigh has made it impossible to connect Waco with what it really was--an incompetent administration having a hissy fit because they could not stop the negative publicity with patience. Had not McVeigh committed mass murder in his outlandish idea of vengeance, we could see Waco for what it was--a stain on our federal government, a measure of the incompetence of Clinton, Reno and BATF and a shameful moment for the news media, who failed to follow up on the administration bungling.

In "Black Hawk Down", I remember reading that our guys had to be rescued using vulnerable Humvees when tanks would have been far better suited to the mission, but there were no tanks sent over because Clinton didn't want to look too agressive to the vile killer Sharia law assholes we were trying to keep in line.

Luckily, he had no such reservations about using a tank on women and children in Waco.

This is the moral arbiter that the anti Tea Party crowd now turns to in the hopes of silencing legimate dissent.

I saw a documentary on TV about that poison gas they fired into Waco. When the fire started, the heat turned the CS gas into cyanide and those poor people died a horrible death as bad as anything Saddam did to the Kurds.

People curled into balls, backwards, as they lost control of their muscles, dying a horrible, painful death.

I'm still at a loss where expressing disgust at this makes us hypocrites over waterboarding a terrorist who may have information about ongoing terrorist plots. After all, the point is not to kill him.

And anyway, garage and freder, explain the moral superiority of Obama now that we simply outsourced the torture to Pakistan, and by remote control we kill the terrorists along with other bystanders with hellfire missles.

In the 1990's, before the internet and blogs gained the ability to wield their own ideas and information independent of the MSM, Clinton was able to disperse his talking points widely and thoroughly and quite successfully.

There is nothing but sadness for the poor yet knowing decision made by Janet Reno, Bill Clinton, and the men who obeyed the orders to willingly inflict maiming and potentially lethal gas onto children and infants.It was a tragic decision that must be forgiven yet learned from.

But when Bill Clinton - who after the horrible deaths he caused and could have prevented with such an immoral decision - instead of shutting up, arrogantly places himself as an arbiter of "civic virtue, it is the height of self-righteousness and condescension. What an ass.

I saw a documentary on TV about that poison gas they fired into Waco. When the fire started, the heat turned the CS gas into cyanide and those poor people died a horrible death as bad as anything Saddam did to the Kurds

Wait! CS is used as a training gas for our troops. Therefore by the standards of this blog, it cannot be bad. After all, if waterboarding is used in SERE training, it can't be torture.

McVeigh's actions have always insulated Clinton from almost any criticism-immediately you are associated with one of the ugliest actors of home grown terror.

Clinton knows how valuable that has been-now he is trying that guilt by association with any critics of Obama.

Like Kenneth Anderson reading back on this-I was struck by the irony of it all:

On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he "will not rest until justice is done." Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members of FALN. What began as a simple paragraph on the AP wire exploded into a major controversy.

Mr. Clinton justified the clemencies by asserting that the sentences were disproportionate to the crimes. None of the petitioners, he stated, had been directly involved in crimes that caused bodily harm to anyone. "For me," the president concluded, "the question, therefore, was whether their continuing incarceration served any meaningful purpose."

His comments, including the astonishing claim that the FALN prisoners were being unfairly punished because of "guilt by association," were widely condemned as a concession to terrorists. Further, they were seen as an outrageous slap in the face of the victims and a bitter betrayal of the cops and federal law enforcement officers who had put their lives on the line to protect the public and who had invested years of their careers to put these people behind bars. The U.S. Sentencing Commission affirmed a pre-existing Justice Department assessment that the sentences, ranging from 30 to 90 years, were "in line with sentences imposed in other cases for similar terrorist activity."

I know I've already posted this-but Clinton's supposed concern for "guilt by association" for FALN terrorists when compared to how he is employing that very method against anyone who criticizes Obama less than kindly is astonishing.

Technically you are right (and you should have pointed out that the use of hollow point ammunition is prohibited under the Hague, not the Geneva, Conventions)

"Use of CS in war is prohibited under the terms of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, signed by most nations in 1993 with all but five other nations signing between the years of 1994 through 1997. The reasoning behind the prohibition is pragmatic: use of CS by one combatant could easily trigger retaliation with much more toxic chemical weapons such as nerve agents. Only five nations have not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention and are therefore unhindered by restrictions on the use of CS gas: Angola, Egypt, North Korea, Somalia, and Syria."

His machination or rubric is to tar any critic of Obama with the responsibility and association in advance with any act of violence committed by any whack job in the future.

In a way that's one of the key elements that makes terrorism so successful-except Clinton is employing the concept in reverse.

Terrorism by it's asymmetric nature and its simple call to violence- by that quality- it is hard to establish who the actors are. If an actor of violence is part of a larger network or a lone sociopath inspired by the terrorists. In that way terrorists frequently get "volunteers" that they've never directly recruited.

It is an element of terrorism that makes it extremely hard to combat-Clinton has taken that lesson, twisted it, and deployed it against his fellow Americans.

If you can't see the difference between small children being used as unwilling torture pawns and grown men and women volunteering to undergo training to face adverse conditions for which they have volunteered.....you must also be blind.

wow, ms althouse. seems you've reached a new low in your blog posts. trying to cast dispersion on the president, and distract from the actual point he tries to make by bringing up something else to try to shame him.

for someone who claims that they just want the tea partiers to be judged 'fairly,' you're playing an awfully dirty game.

and really, this just makes anyone watching question your own motives, and perhaps even your character ....

Clinton's point was that McVeigh was motovated by right-wing "hate-speech" [ie criticism of the Clinton administration], when the truth is that McVveigh was motivated by federal actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Child protective services doesn't think so, [Texas investigators did in several months of visits], and also I didn't father 14 children with underage girls, [as members of the Waco cult admitted]. So other than I think you have a great case.

CS is used as a training gas for our troops. Therefore by the standards of this blog, it cannot be bad.

I believe the CS training for soldiers is to learn how to put on their protective gear, which they are given, under controlled circumstances, similar to waterboarding for training and interrogation purposes.

Conversely, wasn't the govt's intention at Waco to target the children, knowing that the gas masks the Dividians had would only fit adults?

They didn’t vote for me in Oklahoma in 1996. It was still a Republican state. But I love them anyway,...

That's the self involved part-there are some others.

But go read that-and see if you don't get the message that-everyone's freedom of speech should be reined in -(especially those criticizing Obama and federall workers aka big government) because a few whackos will act out.

Notice that Clinton changes the critique of "big government" to a critique of "federal workers" to make his analogy and criticism all the more damning when buttressed with his Oklahoma City bombing foreboding.

Yet you still defend torture by the Bush administration. I guess if the victims are Muslims, everything is okay.

I know people on the left have trouble with this concept, but lemme try anyway: There's a big difference between people who actively participated in mass murder and innocent children. Innocence and guilt, you see, are important concepts, traditionally, which is why a reasonable person could believe, for example, aborting innocent children is wrong and executing serial killers is right.

What an ugly business that was. An ATF publicity stunt gone horrible wrong; an FBI siege?/hostage situation?; Allegations of child sexual abuse; a final assault, against an obvious firetrap, on a day when the winds in Texas were whipping at 30-40 mph. What an ugly, ugly busines.

Child protective services doesn't think so, [Texas investigators did in several months of visits], and also I didn't father 14 children with underage girls, [as members of the Waco cult admitted]. So other than I think you have a great case.

While none of these things are good or anything that anyone on this blog would advocate, they don't rise to the level of gassing and burning to death men, women AND innocent children.

Clinton should know better than to try to open up this can of worms again. As someone already stated, the internet and the communication connections that we have are light years ahead of what existed when Billie Boy and Janet tried to sweep this horrific action under the rug.

They had the MSM in their back pocket then and they have the MSM on their knees in obscene positions performing fellatio. The MSM comes up long enough to drool..."racist, terrorist, nazi, seditionist, teabaggers". slurp slurp

What Bill and the Liberals DON'T have is a hammer lock on information.

Bill must be living in the warm glow of his past to think that his mere finger wagging, bulbous nose presence will make all of us underlings behave.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Clinton callously ordering the murder of American citizens and McVeigh murdering innocent people as a retaliation for the attrocities performed by the Government against its own citizens.

BUT....to try to equate the Tea Party movement, which has largely been peaceful and consists of ordinary middle class people to terrorists who plan to kill and maim is....frankly a move of desperation on the part of the Democrats and the Liberals. No one is buying it.

What Bill and the Liberals DON'T have is a hammer lock on information.

Well that's exactly it.

If you read Clinton's speech in its entirety-which would be torture so I'll give you the jest of it-

Clinton is railing against and smearing rightist blogs and talk radio.

The two things they don't have control over.What's ironic is John Podesta set up the Center for American Progress to try and-well-I don't know what the object was-but-The Al Franken Show at Air America was one of their "efforts".

The Center for American Progress was created in 2003 as a left-wing alternative to think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.[8]

Since its inception, the Center has gathered a group of high-profile senior fellows, including Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan; Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council under President Bill Clinton; Ruy Teixeira, political scientist and author of The Emerging Democratic Majority; and, most recently, former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards.

The Center manages a radio studio, and offers the studio for use to shows across the ideological spectrum. It is used daily by the Bill Press Show, a syndicated talk radio program broadcast from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern Time weekday mornings. Jones Radio Networks is the syndicator.

The Center was often featured prominently on the Al Franken Show on the now defunct Air America Radio network, where Christy Harvey and Al Franken criticized the Bush administration at length, accusing it of dishonesty and incompetence.

The Center has no information on its website about its funding, but the Washington Post reported that "seed money pledged by such deep-pocketed Democrats as financier George Soros (and mortgage billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler)" assisted its formation.[9] The authors of Her Way, a biography of Hillary Clinton, also assert that the Democracy Alliance, a progressive donors collective, has funded the Center. They also assert that the Sandlers and Soros provided seed money.[10]

The Center helped Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) develop "strategic redeployment",[11] a comprehensive plan for the Iraq War that includes a timetable and troop withdrawals.

At the time, Clinton acted as if Reno had OKed the final assault on Waco without consulting him. If you remember, her reputation in Washington actually grew for "taking responsibility" for the fuckup while Bill slipped away. Of course, she didn't resign in shame like a normal person might.

Oh in other words to "protect" them from molestation; suffocate them to death-with tear gas. There are reports that is how they died and that should have been known to happen to children.

There were also reports that Koresh was planning very large events as well. Mass suicide, blowing up the Waco dam. The FBI also told Reno that children were being physically abused inside the compound as the standoff lingered on. The DOJ report indicated they found only one body with benzene [presumably from CS gas]. Koresh lit the place on fire and denied exit to those who wanted to flee, and shot at least 20 of their own members.

OK, read the comments, and as usual idiot Freder show up. I went through the CS routine in basic training, while in the Army. Let's establish something right now: Freder, Bill Clinton and the Reno Woman didn't go through it. It's a bad ass experience. Had either of those 3 idiots that I named, had gone through the CS experience, you would never have used it on civilians. Especially, women and children.

Texas child protective services also strongly recommended against an armed raid on the compound, on the grounds that it would pose a serious threat to the lives of the children.

Oops.

Incidentally, the accusations that provoked the raid resulted in a grand total of one conviction -- of a man who wasn't at the compound that day. The other convictions were in connection to the siege itself.

What has always bothered me about the Feds and Waco is that supposedly they were there to arrest the head of the group in Waco which is something they could have done every week when he came to Waco to go shopping. They never had to do anything to the Branch Davidians at all; just arrest David Koresh when he showed up in Waco.

I have never seen any explanation for why they did not do that in the first place. If they had removed David Koresh from the picture, then chances are the group would just dissolve and the whole thing would be over.

I don't think the Feds were punished anything like they should have been for what they do there.

"... yet he's done the opposite this week in his far-fetched but aggressive attack on the Tea Party movement."

And why not?

He's a fucking murderer and he's walking the streets a free man, getting his cock sucked by every whore in Hollywood while that cunt of a wife of his trashes our country to every third-rate African housewife Barack Obama sends her to.

Bill Fucking Clinton is un-Fucking-Touchable. He can kill whoever he wants, bitch. And you'll like it.

Why shouldn't he be committing aggressive attacks on honest, hard-working Americans? He's been doing it his entire career to the dulcet strains of ovation from the mass media.

I have never seen any explanation for why they did not do that in the first place. If they had removed David Koresh from the picture, then chances are the group would just dissolve and the whole thing would be over.

Because the point of the original raid was to create teevee news pictures of a dangerous cult and its arsenal. This was the ATF, and they were getting heat in Congress for their budget and tactics. It was designed to grease them through a tricky committee hearing on a wave of publicity.

Autopsy photographs of other children locked in what appear to be spasmic death poses are consistent with cyanide poisoning, one of the results produced by burning CS gas.[35 The DOJ report indicated that only one body had traces of benzene, one of the components of solvent-dispersed CS gas, but that the gas insertions had finished nearly one hour before the fire ended, and that it was enough time for solvents to dissipate from the bodies of the Davidians that had inhaled the tear gas.

From the only THREE (count 'em, three) terrorists (we're talking people who we had every right to kill on the spot) who were waterboarded way back in the early 2000's (that was it), we got valuable information that prevented scheduled terrorist attacks. One was going to be on the tallest building in LA, another in Chicago. So, according to liberals, it would have been better for 6.000 Americans to be blown up than to give a known terrorist a few minutes of college-hazing level "torture."

As if that's not sick enough, I have to read disgusting posts by Freder and Garage that say President Clinton gassing 87 of his own citizens to death to look macho is just like President Bush SAVING his thousands of his citizens from death by giving three terrorists a bad day. (Unlike those innocent children, the terrorists are doing just fine these days, thank you.)

Let's ignore the fact that the four federal agents wouldn't have gotten killed in the first place if ATF officials had been thinking with their brains instead of their genitals.

The point is, once the siege began you had a situation where innocent children were living with a group of people who (a) wanted to protect those children but (b) believed the government was attempting to kill them all. That's a situation that calls for finesse, not jackboot tactics. The government's #1 priority should have been to ensure the safety of those children. Instead, the government's #1 priority was winning the siege, with the children viewed as merely a means to that end.

*That* is the real problem with what Clinton and Reno did. We're not disputing that the Branch Davidians broke the law. We're criticizing the government's means of dealing with what was essentially a hostage situation by repeatedly threatening and destabilizing an already insane and heavily-armed group of hostage takers!

Incidentally, the accusations that provoked the raid resulted in a grand total of one conviction -- of a man who wasn't at the compound that day. The other convictions were in connection to the siege itself.

garage, what is your point? Is your point that these Branch Dividians, were what, sissies? That they should have been able to tough it out? Is what what you're trying to tell everyone? The CS wasn't that big of a deal?

danielle:"wow, ms althouse. seems you've reached a new low in your blog posts. trying to cast dispersion [sic] on the president, and distract from the actual point he tries to make by bringing up something else to try to shame him.

for someone who claims that they [sic] just want the tea partiers to be judged 'fairly,' you're playing an awfully dirty game.

and really, this just makes anyone watching question your own motives, and perhaps even your character ...."

Got that Ann? Youth For Obama is watching your blog, is noticing you let people express their political views without censorship, and warns you that others are also watching, who will look into the matter further.

This is from the Department of Justice's own report and can be found at their web site.

The Medical Examiner found no traces of narcotics or other controlled substances in any of the bodies recovered from the compound. Carbon Monoxide was found in 50 of the bodies, at saturation levels varying widely, from 10% to 79%. One body contained traces of benzene, a chemical found in gasoline, paint removers, and other commercial solvents. Benzene was also one of the chemicals comprising the CS tear gas. It is impossible to know how many of the persons inside the compound inhaled the tear gas, because the last gas insertions ended nearly an hour before the fire ended. That lapse of time would have been sufficient for the CS gas to have dissipated from any of the bodies in which it might have been present earlier.

"Medical examiners that did the autopsies disagree with you. CS gas only has a persistence factor of about ten minutes"

Ah! Those babies were such... babies! What's a little poison gas attack, anyway? It's not as if they were giving some bad ass the sensation of drowning for a few seconds at a time, six minutes total. That's a REAL a crime against humanity!

Willie wanted to show how tough he was on crime and so, he targeted Koresh. The FBI had him under surveillance and nobody was going anyplace, but Willie and Major Reno wanted a show and, in so doing, violated (shredded, really) the Posse Comitatus Act by using serving Regular troops in a police action.

He could have and should have been impeached for it.

Freder/Montagne/Alpha, whoever he is today, seems to think just because he says waterboarding is torture makes it so. This has been a contention of the Demos since they found it was more important to gain a little political advantage than to defend the American people. Unfortunately for him and them, most Americans disagree.

The Geneva Convention is only valid against other signers of the Geneva convention and only against national armies. It is not pertinent against individual terrorists who are not uniformed soldiers of national governments.

Basically what Clinton is laying the foundation for-is when the next lone nut acts out-Democrats will have the ground work to justify one of their other long held dreams -the heavy regulation of talk radio.

You got to admire a Garage type. If you ever decide to do something really heinous and indefensible, he'll be there to fight for your right to do so and defame your victims if needed or even if not. Hell, he even do this to defend someone he doesn't know, as long they have the right voter registration.

Its interesting to me that Bill Clinton doesn't know when to leave well enough alone. If he keeps this up, he may well find himself subject to lawsuits (the politcal kind) on Waco before the end of his dying days. Perhaps being our countrys first Pinoche' to be tried by a kangaroo court after his politcal friends have deserted him?

The warrant they had was to arrest David Koresh. That is my point. They could have done that at any time prior to the raid. They went way beyond their warrant and at the support of the AG and the president. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Are you saying that it is A-OK for the president, the attorney general and the ATF to pick and choose an example including women and children, many of them babies, because you want to prove your mettle against supposed domestic gun groups? Is that really what you want to support? Big difference from waterboarding 3, repeat 3, known terrorists in order to get intelligence to protect the country. Seems like you are supporting the wrong initiative to me.

Connoisseurs of facts will recall that GHW Bush was President when Ruby Ridge went down, the fruit of an investigation that started in the middle of Reagan's second term. Unless "Clint" was the nickname of some Reaganaut.

But it's fascinating to see the professor suggest that the massacre of Waco somehow excused or justified the massacre in Oklahoma City. Else why connect the two?

LOL, to say that is very clintonian, since he obviously did attack them but left himself a very silly and unbelievable rhetorical wiggle room that only the most devoted partisans would swallow.

Bill Clinton wouldn't last 5 minutes in today's political field, and I doubt he would have won a 2 way race, either. What a putz. He's a basher of the Tea Party in the harshest and lowest terms yet. He can't even own up to this conduct?

We're criticizing the government's means of dealing with what was essentially a hostage situation by repeatedly threatening and destabilizing an already insane and heavily-armed group of hostage takers!

So what would you have done differently? I don't have the answer. Koresh obviously killed or ordered many killed as it was. How were they supposed to know at the time he wasn't planning on killing them all? 51 day standoff, 4 ATF agents gunned down serving a legal warrant....

Clinton was an ass for not stopping this insane GHW plot. Waco started when the ATF opened an investigation in June of 1992. They attempted to serve a search warrant on the compound five weeks after Clinton was inaugurated. GHWB's holdover FBI director took control, establishing the siege that ended tragically exactly three months after Clinton was inaugurated.

But Clinton should have figured anything started by Bush I was bushit, and stopped the lunacy.

They attempted to serve a search warrant on the compound five weeks after Clinton was inaugurated.

That's glossing over a really important detail. They "attempted to serve" that search warrant in the form of a commando-style assault on the compound. The problem with this "take control" style of law enforcement is you needlessly escalate situations that might have been handled peacefully.

Which is hindsight, I admit, but in those kinds of situations SOP should have one or two agents going to the door, knocking, and presenting the search warrant so the people inside don't feel like they're being attacked.

The warrant they had was to arrest David Koresh. That is my point. They could have done that at any time prior to the raid. They went way beyond their warrant and at the support of the AG and the president. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Are you saying that it is A-OK for the president, the attorney general and the ATF to pick and choose an example including women and children, many of them babies, because you want to prove your mettle against....

I'm afraid you've somehow placed me on the wrong side of this pissing contest, Hoss.

This was what I was referring to in my previous post. Sounds to me like you were approving the action. Sorry if I read you wrong.

Blogger mesquito said...

I have never seen any explanation for why they did not do that in the first place. If they had removed David Koresh from the picture, then chances are the group would just dissolve and the whole thing would be over.

Because the point of the original raid was to create teevee news pictures of a dangerous cult and its arsenal. This was the ATF, and they were getting heat in Congress for their budget and tactics. It was designed to grease them through a tricky committee hearing on a wave of publicity.

Bill Clinton himself brought up Waco in his NYT op-ed (linked in the post):

"Finally, we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them. On that April 19, the second anniversary of the assault of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, deeply alienated and disconnected Americans decided murder was a blow for liberty."

madawaskan wrote: Basically what Clinton is laying the foundation for-is when the next lone nut acts out-Democrats will have the ground work to justify one of their other long held dreams -the heavy regulation of talk radio.

I hope you're wrong but I think you may be on to something with that thought.

Friends, friends, oh my dear friends, what you are finally getting to watch is the revealing truth to how deranged nitwits like Tubby Mahal and Freaky Fredders get to justify their abominable ideology be trying to retry incidents like Waco as a means to rehabilitate the image of one Bill Clinton. What you really get to see here is the how these infantile thinkers really think, which is to say, poorly and shallowly in an attempt to repudiate how government as a function of its largess, size, and scope can impose its will upon the citizenry without a methodology of due process, but rather in the case of Waco was a siege and a siege mentality that these fools clearly justify because Clinton and Reno adjudicated it.

Does anyone here not remember the small incident of one Elian Gonzolas and how that was prosecuted and turned out? Is there any reason to think that these two insipid fools are nothing more than cheap tools for an ideology that can seek the levels of justification of killing presumably innocent American citizens as an orchestrated projection of its will on said American citizens? Fatty McBlubber Mahal and his moronic sidekick Freaky, couldn't give two shits about anything regarding what they think is nothing more than a conspiratorial smear campaign against Clinton and Reno to further promote how baseless their ideology really is. This is the level that these fools have sunk to and we as conservatives and right thinking citizens have to deal with. We are the ones that are paying for these idiots irresponsibilities of who they vote for from the past, in this present, and pray tell in the future.

In his speech that started this all he mentions radio four times, and blogs once-then he has this:

the new ways people had of communicating both through the radio talk shows and the insipient[sic] Internet networks.

[the transcript at the Center for American Progress spells it like that..]

Also if you follow his speech he knows that the economic times are going to stress certain border line people to act out-and he is moving fast to blame it all ahead of time on the unchecked free speech of those critiquing Obama.

When you couple that with the Center for American Progress-their reason for being-and their failed attempts to counter talk radio with the Bill Press radio show and then The Al Franken Show-you can see the-if you can't join 'em beat them with regulation move coming.

Leland Yee, California State Senator, Says He Was 'Threatened' By Palin Supporters

"It is quite disturbing that such racist and homophobic sentiment still exists in our country," said Yee, according to the statement. "It is unfortunate acts like these that demonstrate why we must continue to be vigilant against hate and intolerance."

Yee has since forwarded to the threats to the California State Senate Sergeant-at-Arms for investigation.

My sister-in-law lives in Oklahoma City and was living there when McVeigh bombed the Murra Building. She is deeply offended - many Oklahomans are - by Bill Clinton's attempt to use their tragedy to score political points. Defenders of Clinton - the execreble Freder here first among them by trying to equate Clinton's barbaric decision with that of people that make Freder shit when he hears their name (Bush)- should be deeply ashamed today for their selfish efforts here. Sadly, that's an impossibility for the less-than-fully-humans like Freder.

So what would you have done differently? I don't have the answer. Koresh obviously killed or ordered many killed as it was.

There's nothing obvious about that claim. Twenty of the dead were shot, but we'll never know if those were executions or (as the medical examiner who autopsied them believed) mercy killings to avoid death by suffocation and/or fire. What we DO know is that the killings didn't happen until after the FBI began to storm the compound.

In any event, the fact that Koresh let so many people leave (and, in fact, ordered some to leave) refutes the notion that he planned a Jonestown scenario.

How were they supposed to know at the time he wasn't planning on killing them all?

The fact that he had already voluntarily sent a bunch of them out would be an important clue that he wasn't planning on killing them all. The truth is that the government has never produced any evidence that Koresh planned to kill his followers or their children.

51 day standoff, 4 ATF agents gunned down serving a legal warrant....

Look up the term "sunk costs".

At the point where the siege began, the ATF's moronic cowboy tactics had already gotten eight people killed (four agents, for Branch Davidians). That's certainly a good argument for firing everyone who authorized the raid. What it isn't, is an argument for putting dozens of innocent lives at stake solely for the sake of the government's tattered reputation.

What the government should have done, at that point, was recognize that they had acted with unwarranted aggression towards a peaceful, but heavily-armed and mentally unstable, group of people. The smart move would have been to ratchet down the tension, let them establish communications with the outside world again, and negotiate. What the government did instead was cut the Branch Davidians off from the outside world, surround them with armored vehicles, cut power and water, and deliberately disrupt their sleep with loud noises and music.

Those are good tactics if you're planning a military assault on a position. Those are lousy tactics if you're trying to convince people you AREN'T planning a military assault.

Master cylinder, you are either unbelieveably stupid to make a statement like that, or devoid of a human soul. My niece in Oklahoma City lost a former baby-sitter to McVeigh. No one here is defending McVeigh. If you seriously don't get that, I wish you a life of serious pain to balance your thoughtless, inciteful statements.

The bottom line, so far the only real violence (as opposed to the "not-young, somewhat plump white people scare me" kind of violence) associated with the Tea Party protests has been inflicted upon Tea Party sympathizers.

McVeigh can rot in hell, and Bill Clinton can only hope hell is administered on a curve.

Now the National Socialists are trying to say criticism of Willie translates to support of Koresh. They know they've lost this one, we know they've lost this one, so they try something even more ridiculous.

Even a completely insane child raping religious cult leader who barricaded it's members and lit them on fire gets the nod over Clinton.

Being an insane religious cult leader isn't illegal. If it was, we'd have to lock up Jeremiah Wright and then where would the President attend church? :)

The crimes Koresh appears to have been guilty of were statutory rape and conspiracy to purchase illegal automatic weapons. Nothing that would justify the original raid, let alone the ensuing siege. The government should simply have arrested him in town and left it at that. But that wouldn't make for a sexy news story about the heroic ATF, now would it.

Hey - look at me - I'm a liberal! I set up false arguments with only 2 choices so I can win by making fun of whichever choice they make! It's fun - c'mon try it:

If you don't like what Bill Clinton said you must be a lover of mass murderers! Yea, that's a good one . . . let's start there.

I am a smart liberal - I get to lie, cause telling the truth isn't in the liberal handbook! Only whatever you have to do to win or get your way! What a great way to live! Insist that non-liberals live to standards, but don't have to myself!

Mentally unstable people shouldn't have the right to be heavily armed. Sorry. especially when they're prepared for a gas attack too!

You have to laugh at people who are so unstable they actually think... no, no, stop laughing and let me finish... they actually think the government might come and, you know, stage a military assault on their home. Gawd these people are crazy.

If there was a mosque gone berserk, with women and children there, the federal government would not approach the search and seizure the way it did at Waco. This is because, as everybody including you knows, Clinton and Reno completely fucked the thing up.

Waco will be taught for generations as a textbook study in how not to go about this sort of thing.

Man up, dude. Admit that Clinton fucked up big time here. He was still a perfectly respectable president. But your (and his) incessant defending takes away from the good he did.

They were "served the warrant" by a paramilitary force that stormed the compound with assault rifles and helicopters. If, for some crazy reason, that sounds like "the peaceful way" to you, let me clarify my earlier statement:

The government resorted to it immediately without any attempt at disarmament more peaceful than sending in a paramilitary assault force.

I hope that clears up the confusion about how the government screwed the pooch on this one.

And 4 people got shot. That's unpeaceful way.

25 people got shot. It is unknown who started the shooting, although the Branch Davidians called 911 three minutes into the assault to beg the government to stop.

If they would have complied with the law and the warrant none of this would have happened.

There are two things that, had they happened differently, would have prevented the bloodbath.

The first is that the unstable heavily armed cult group expecting a apocalyptic assault by government forces could, when assaulted by government forces, said "oh, its probably just some routine legal thing", put down their weapons, and let the government agents into the building to arrest their leader.

The second is that the government could have used basic common sense at any point during the days preceding the raid.

"They 'attempted to serve' that search warrant in the form of a commando-style assault on the compound. "

Not only that, but the government's inside informant actually called them before the raid and told them the element of surprise was gone, that the Davidians knew something was up. They went ahead with the raid anyway.

You're much more foul than usual, what's the problem? The Davidians may have been loony, but they weren't "berserk with heavy weapons", or even sedate with heavy weapons. They merely owned (and engaged in trade in) ordinary, completely-legal-to-civilians small arms--the same kind of think you can buy at any Big 5 or Cabelas.

Clinton brings up Waco because McVeigh used Waco as a justification for terrorism.

So the folks here who are taking Clinton to task for the tragedy at Waco are saying that McVeigh WAS justified. And that terrorism is justifiable.

Which is exactly what Clinton is warning about. I expect one of these right-wing nut jobs to start murdering people any day now. After all, they have a track record of doing just that, AND mainstream conservative support for their actions, as evidenced by this blogger and her commenters.

It's also so great to have allies in the fight for civil liberties against police power! It's too bad that you believe that only by having guns and a militia, not, say, a nonviolent protest against a political convention, do you deserve the rights guaranteed to you by the constitution.

What has always bothered me about the Feds and Waco is that supposedly they were there to arrest the head of the group in Waco which is something they could have done every week when he came to Waco to go shopping. They never had to do anything to the Branch Davidians at all; just arrest David Koresh when he showed up in Waco.

I have never seen any explanation for why they did not do that in the first place.

as mosquito mentioned upthread, it wasn't about Koresh and the Davidians. It was abou the ATF's annual network TV publicity stunt they pulled right before Congressional budgeting each year. I know because my brother was in ATF and for several years in a row would call to say watch them on TV that night. He was shot twice in Waco, but fully recovered.

Wow--I spend a couple of days trout fishing on the little missouri river in arkansas (great spot, BTW) and I check in on the blog.

Driving thru hot springs I see they are proud that hot springs was the boyhood home of bill clinton--the president who will most probably be put in the same category of warren gamaliel harding--Mr clinton will be remembered as the finger wagging president who didnt have sex with that woman ms lewinski, and by a stained blue dress--Mr Clinton has no credibility at all. What is it with democrat ex presidents?

Clinton brings up Waco because McVeigh used Waco as a justification for terrorism.

Boy are you feebleminded. Did you even read the subject material? Clinton was trying to compare the Tea Party criticism of this administration to the "hate speech" he thinks drove McVeigh to bomb the Murrah Building.

He mentions Waco once, noting that it was on the second anniversary of the assault that McVeigh attacked. As if by coicidence...

So the folks here who are taking Clinton to task for the tragedy at Waco are saying that McVeigh WAS justified.

No. People are saying that McVeigh thought he was justified because of Waco. If this confuses you, then you really shouldn't post on the internet. Idiot.

I expect one of these right-wing nut jobs to start murdering people any day now. After all, they have a track record of doing just

No, they don't. But the Left does. You have anything to say about that?

AND mainstream conservative support for their actions, as evidenced by this blogger and her commenters.

No evidence on this blog of support for domestic terror acts. Damn, you really are a moron.

Snookie: Please stop your put downs of garage and other libtards for a moment and consider that while Sarah obviously is Goldstein every day, at 6:00 EDT, The Tea Partiers have been included. Jeez, keep up with the rest of us, will you.

Putting down garage and others like him diverts one's attention so let's concentrate on the important stuff, eh! We're much better off letting garage et al swing in the wind from the rope they hung themselves with.